Malcolm Gladwell discusses the extent of effectiveness of social media in promoting social changes. He uses an example of a rights and freedoms movement in the southern U.S. in 1960 to show that such events did not need anything like emails, Facebook, Twitter, and the likes. His reasoning is that high-risk activism events involve the “strong-tie” phenomena, meaning that participants are more engaged and motivated in the movement if they have “close friends” alongside them in the movement. When it comes to using social media nowadays, Gladwell states that “where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools”. He acknowledges the speed and vastness of social media networks, but argues that they only spread
